ECM to Release Second Tabakova Album

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

I first encountered Bulgarian-born composer Dobrinka Tabakova in the spring of 2013 when ECM New Series released her debut album String Paths. This attracted enough attention to lead to a Grammy nomination. After a wait of over a decade, the second ECM album of her compositions, Sun Triptych, will be released this coming Friday; and, as most readers will probably anticipate, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders!

The title of the album is also the title of the final composition. This is a three-movement suite. Appropriately enough, the titles of the movements are “Dawn, “Day, and “Dusk.” There is also a second work in three movements, entitled Suite in Jazz Style. The titles of these movements are “Talk,” “Nocturnal,” and “Dance.” While there is no mention of it in the relatively sparse background material at my disposal, I would propose an “educated guess” that this suite was a “response” to the “call” of Suite in the Old Style, which concluded the String Paths album, probably with more than a nod to Alfred Schnittke’s 1972 Suite in the Old Style. That said, I would also suggest that Schnittke had a better (not to mention more playful) ear for that “old style” than Tabakova had for jazz, possibly because the viola-piano pairing never finds a particularly “jazzy” rhetoric.

I came away from my listening to “Fantasy Homage to Schubert” with similar doubts. This is a full-orchestra composition with the composer conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra. Sadly, I felt that the composer’s reflections on Schubert were just as muddled those involving Schnittke’s achievements.

After some “back-to-back” listening to both of Tabakova’s albums, I came away with the conclusion that she was more inclined to wit in her earlier release. Whatever her thoughts about jazz may be, I felt that most of the tracks on the new album ran the risk of bogging down in too much seriousness. This is not to advocate frivolity. Rather, it is a matter of whether or not the music lures the attentive listener to anticipate what is likely to be next encountered. For all of Tabakova’s interest in Schubert and jazz, I felt that I never had a “what-next?” moment while listening to the Sun Triptych album.